Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Your Perfect Mule Deer Rifle

If you'da used the swift or a 243 also, your average might be down where mine is. A 6.5 120 at 2975. Welcome to the weenie-baby club.

John and that is the reason I have settled on my 280AI, could have skipped the AI part and been fine. A .284 150 NBT in any setting will serve all of my needs.


Randy

My perfect mule deer rifle? This one:



Even works on whitetails:

Nice bucks buddy. I like the rifle too.

Sam;
Happy Thanksgiving to you sir, I trust that this has been a good one for you and yours.

Thanks for the interesting reading and viewing that your question/thread has provided. It's interesting how many different roads there are that lead to the same eventual outcome, isn't it?

Anyway, there was a time a couple decades back when we (my hunting partner, my good wife or I) would end up dragging at least one and most years two mulies off the local hills on our backs.

I built a .308 Norma on a wartime 98 action for my wife to give us a bit more reach across the feeder creeks and such. It looks like this.


I liked the cartridge so much that I cobbled together a Norma for myself on a 77 action and between the two rifles accounted for a fair few mulie bucks - along with the odd whitetail - over the years.

Sometime a bit later I started hunting this way.


For that style of hunting I modified a No. 1 which happened to be in .300 Win Mag - and the combination of the No. 1 and Carly the Appy proved to be a workable solution too.

This wasn't a horse hunting day exactly - it was a day off school for the girls so naturally we went hunting.

The No. 1 still worked there too, as long as I didn't have to carry it too far, as like another hat wearer here, I'll admit to being not that rugged a fellow.


That time frame in my life accounted for the most mature mulies, so a 165gr or 180gr bullet heading out at 3100fps was the recipe.

Somewhere along the way I began to care less and less about mulie racks though Sam. Who knows, I might take up the chase again some year again - or not. This guy for instance is laying almost exactly where our eldest shot her mulie from this fall -on the mountain just behind our place.



These days I just use a plain vanilla .270 money pit 98 parts gun to fill the freezer most falls if I can. It weighs 7lbs holding 5 rounds of 130gr bullets that exit going 3050fps.

So that's my current mulie rifle and the path I've taken to get there.

Thanks again for the thread Sam and again all the best to you and yours this Thanksgiving.

Dwayne

Thanks for all the great posts, some really nice bucks on this thread!




Dwayne, awesome pics of your daughters and the pony.

You are also back to the old 270, I'm really surprised....grin



At 12 or 13 years old I started out with a 22-250 and it worked fine on a few deer and antelope. Couple years later I got a push feed M70 Winlite in 25-06. That is the only rifle I wish I still had, McMillian stock, nice and handy, etc..

By the time I was a junior or senior in high school the local hardware store had a 300 Win mag so like an idiot I traded the 25-06.

The 300 Mag was one of those monstrosities with the infamous ear breaking BOSS system. Used that thing for a few years and almost went deaf, didn't know any better.

In the mean time I picked up a slightly used ADL in 270 that was much easier on the ears. Still have that one but it's not anything I'd carry around all day on purpose.

Hunted a year or two with a pencil barreled '06 and then onto a couple different 300 WSM's. Actually really like the lightweight Sako A7 and used it several years in a row.


This past Fall was the Kimber 243's first season so of course I had to try that one out.



First deer(a few years ago.... grin), it's still hanging in my parent's house.

No way that's you.

No Aviators?

.220 Swift took this 30" buck 28 years ago, north of Bozeman in the Bridger Range.

The Swift will work fine if you choose your shots and keep them under 350 or so...

You can get a pretty nice buck down in those backyards..

now that's super coool!!!!!!!!

I liked it when you had to climb the mountain....times sure have changed.

Yeah, where's the beer!?

Agreed, in spades! I have purchased or more often traded into over the years many cool lever action rifles in various calibers that I wanted to use including a couple of 25/35's, a 22 Hi Power carbine, three or four 250/3000's, coupla 30/30 in both regular and AI versions, several 348WCF's, two different 358's all with the idea that I was going to take them somewhere in the Eastern US and hunt Whitetails in a classic old timey manner. I even have all of the LL Bean and Filson red and black hunting garments down to the Bean "Maine Hunting Shoes" Each time, though, these rifles have had to be sacrificed to the realities of a too early forced retirement and the always insidious monthly bills and such that keep coming. Still clinging to the hope of such a hunt, though.

I am REALLY enjoying this thread! Lots of great Mule Deer buck photos and some awesome rifles, both custom and high end factory stuff.

I have some neat mounts from my days of hunting in Africa most years, but very few animals are as pretty and as grand as a really good Mule Deer buck, IMO. Even after killing a semi load of them and my chronic pain and exhaustion issues I still get really excited about the mule deer opener! And I STILL have to talk myself down from trying to shoot with buck fever making a steady shot more difficult! Just love it, and these bucks. Keep 'em (the pictures) coming, please!

Sam,

Cool photo!

Those damn BOSS's have to be loudest muzzle brake ever invented. I was with a buddy in Colorado once when he shot a good mule deer buck with his .30-06 A-Bolt with a BOSS. He hit the buck pretty well the first shot, but was using a very hard "wonder bullet" that's no longer made, and the buck didn't die quickly, so he kept shooting--and the buck still died slowly. My buddy said, "I knew the rifle was going off because every time I pulled the trigger I went deaf!"

Sam...great thread here. Your 1st deer was a outstanding start!

Whitebird, Safariman, Mudhen, Montanaman, Huntsman, CFVA, BC, Scenar.....Nice rifles all!

For myself, my 1st rifle was a little 660 Rem .243. Moved on to a .280 Rem on a VZ24 Mauser and then a 10 1/2 lb FN Mauser 06.....still have this one. Then had an old Pre 64 H&H action barreled up as a .338. I owned that for 20 years and used it exclusively for 10. Mule deer, whitetails, and one cow elk.

More recently, I've stuck with 2 Husky Mausers....one factory pencil barreled 06 in a Rimrock glass stock and a 9.3x62 in the original wood.

I've got 2 .270's waiting......one old JC Higgins that now has a Micky Edge. The original barrel doesn't shoot real good, so if I can't make it behave, then on goes a Brux #2 9 twist. The other is a FN Mauser Deluxe which has a barrel taper very close to the Brux.

This batch of old Mausers will probably stay with me 'til I auger in. The only others I would like to try would be a Kimber Montana 84M of some sort. That's it for my Mule deer rifles. Great thread and pics all.

Pat heres another north Bridger buck from back in the day�this was 21 years ago!



7x57

Could be a 7mm SAUM?

Sure sounds like a 270 Winchester to me...

Bridger bucks.....taken in the late 70's.